Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

by Frank, Thomas

  Organized labor was the great force of the Roosevelt years, but it is atomized labor, cheered for and pushed by Democrats like Plouffe and Lehane, that will forever shape American memories of the Obama years. Of the companies that are poised to profit on this coming war of all against all, Uber is the most famous; as I have mentioned, it invites each of us to spend our spare time as hacks for hire. But with the magic of innovation, virtually any field can join the race to the bottom. There’s LawTrades, a sort of Uber for lawyers, and HouseCall, an Uber for “home service professionals.” Everyone’s favorite is something called TaskRabbit, which allows people to farm out odd jobs to random day laborers, whom the app encourages you to imagine as cute, harmless bunnies.

  “Crowdworking” is the most startling variation on the theme, a scheme that allows anyone, anywhere to perform tiny digital tasks in exchange for extremely low pay. This way, everyone can become part of the great “on-demand labor pool” of millions, coming together to parse data and make Silicon Valley’s bottom line that much fatter. The CEO of a crowdworking company called CrowdFlower explains how the magic is done:

  Before the Internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes. But with technology, you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore.21

  By the way, the CEO who reportedly spoke those lines—a young gentleman named Lukas Biewald—is an Obama donor who, according to a post on the CrowdFlower blog, was asked in 2012 to help out with the Big Data part of the president’s reelection campaign.22

  TECH AS CULTURE

  Few of the innovations I have mentioned here were laudable—at least, not in the ecstatic UNICEF way people celebrate inno these days. The more important point is that none of them were inevitable. Government could easily have prevented or at least mitigated every single one of the developments I have described; it was fully within the power of Washington or our various state governments. Indeed, when a company’s business strategy consists of some novel way to get around safety regulations, or antitrust statutes, or basic labor law, it is the government’s duty to do something about it.

  The Obama administration’s Justice Department came into office promising stern action against corporate cartels that fixed prices, which is precisely what the Silicon Valley Techtopus seems to have been doing with tech workers; an official from the Antitrust Division had even announced in a 2009 speech that “the Division has long advocated that the most effective deterrent for hard core cartel activity, such as price fixing, bid rigging, and allocation agreements, is stiff prison sentences.”23

  Not this time. When the Justice Department learned about the conspiracy to suppress tech workers’ wages in 2010, it did just about the same thing it had done with the “Too Big to Jail” banks: it filed a civil suit and boldly extracted from the tech companies in question … a promise not to do it again, for five years. (The affected tech workers had more success on their own, filing a class-action lawsuit against four of the big Silicon Valley companies; it was settled for $415 million in 2015.)24

  Let’s look again at Uber, the machine for inequality, which has had a damaging effect on many people who drive taxis for a living. It also happens to be a clever innovation. This has made it a basic political test for Democrats: Should they support the company with its ingenious software, or the working people whose livelihoods it threatens?

  Some cities in Belgium, Canada, Germany, and India have answered the question by banning Uber. France has declared certain Uber operations illegal and at one point arrested several Uber executives. In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio chose to side with taxi drivers, calling for a cap on the number of Uber drivers allowed in the city. But Governor Andrew Cuomo got the last word, forcing de Blasio to back down and saluting Uber as “one of these great inventions, startups, of this new economy … it’s offering a great service for people, and it’s giving people jobs.”25

  Had Andrew Cuomo chosen to require Uber to play by the existing rules in New York, he could have done so. Had the Federal Trade Commission wished to rein in exorbitant price increases in certain prescription drugs, they could have done so. Had the FTC chosen to lower the boom on Google, that too appears to have been within its power. Why didn’t the Party of the People try? Was that old ocean liner just too hard to turn?

  I doubt it. That Google hired several of President Obama’s former advisers probably had something to do with it. But a more basic reason is that many of our leading Democrats know you don’t treat blue-state innovators in this way. They lead clean industries, virtuous industries—knowledge industries. They represent the learning class, the creative class. They are the future, and what you do with the future is you win it.

  In reality, there is little new about this stuff except the software, the convenience, and the spying. Each of the innovations I have mentioned merely updates or digitizes some business strategy that Americans learned long ago to be wary of. Amazon updates the practices of Wal-Mart, for example, while Google has dusted off corporate behavior from the days of the Robber Barons. What Uber does has been compared to the every-man-for-himself hiring procedures of the pre-union shipping docks, while TaskRabbit is just a modern and even more flexible version of the old familiar temp agency I worked for back in the 1980s. Together, as Robert Reich has written, all these developments are “the logical culmination of a process that began thirty years ago when corporations began turning over full-time jobs to temporary workers, independent contractors, free-lancers, and consultants.”26 This is atavism, not innovation. It has not reversed the trends of the last thirty years; it has accelerated them. And if we keep going in this direction, it will one day reduce all of us to day laborers, standing around like the guys outside the local hardware store, hoping for work.

  Technological innovation is not the reason all this is happening, just as the atomic bomb was not the cause of World War II: it is the latest weapon in an age-old war. Technological innovation is not what is hammering down working peoples’ share of what the country earns; technological innovation is the excuse for this development. Inno is a fable that persuades us to accept economic arrangements we would otherwise regard as unpleasant or intolerable—that convinces us that the very particular configuration of economic power we inhabit is in fact a neutral matter of science, of nature, of the way God wants things to be. Every time we describe the economy as an “ecosystem” we accept this point of view. Every time we write off the situation of workers as a matter of unalterable “reality” we resign ourselves to it.

  In truth, we have been hearing some version of all this inno-talk since the 1970s—a snarling Republican iteration, which demands our submission before the almighty entrepreneur; and a friendly and caring Democratic one, which promises to patch us up with job training and student loans. What each version brushes under the rug is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Economies aren’t ecosystems. They aren’t naturally occurring phenomena to which we must learn to acclimate. Their rules are made by humans. They are, in a word, political. In a democracy we can set the economic table however we choose.

  “Amazon is not happening to bookselling,” Jeff Bezos of Amazon likes to say. “The future is happening to bookselling.” And what the future wants just happens to be exactly what Amazon wants. What an amazing coincidence.

  As long as we continue to believe such statements, for exactly that long will the situation of average Americans continue to deteriorate and inequality to worsen.

  11

  Liberal Gilt

  We have now observed several instances of the cycle of enthusiastic idealism that propels modern Democratic politics, as well as the lagging cycle of disappointment that invariably follows it. Both cycles are highly predictable given the economic desperation of ordinary Americans—and so is the next stage in the process: the transfer of this passionate idealism to Hillary Clinton. It i
s, as they say, her turn. After losing to Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries in 2008, she waited patiently for the years to pass, serving as his secretary of state, doing good works with the Clinton Foundation, and now she gets both to run for the presidency and to be the vessel of liberal hopes. It is to her that we will all soon look for our salvation.

  As Hillary Clinton has no doubt noticed, the circumstances of 2016 present a striking similarity to the ones that put her husband in the White House in 1992. Again Americans are outraged at the way the middle class is falling to pieces and at the greed of the people on top. The best-seller lists are once again filled with books about inequality. Today Americans are working even harder for even less than when Bill Clinton made “working harder for less” his campaign catchphrase. The way Hillary Clinton—the way any Democrat—will play such a situation is extremely easy to guess.

  “You see corporations making record profits, with CEOs making record pay, but your paychecks have barely budged,” Hillary declared in June 2015, launching her presidential campaign. “Prosperity can’t be just for CEOs and hedge fund managers.” On she talked as the months rolled by, pronouncing in her careful way the rote denunciations of Wall Street that were supposed to make the crowds roar and the financiers tremble.

  That those financiers and hedge fund managers do not actually find Hillary’s populism menacing is a well-established fact. Barack Obama’s mild rebukes caused Wall Street to explode in fury and self-pity back in 2009 and 2010; the financiers pouted and cried and picked up their campaign donations and went home. But Hillary’s comments provoke no such reaction. Only a few days before she launched her campaign, for example, John Mack, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley, was asked by a host on the Fox Business channel whether her populist talk was causing him to reconsider his support for her. On the contrary: “To me, it’s all politics,” he responded. “It’s trying to get elected, to get the nomination.”1

  “None of them think she really means her populism,” wrote a prominent business journalist in 2014 about the bankers and Hillary. The Clinton Foundation has actually held meetings at the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, he points out. He quotes another Morgan Stanley officer, who believes that “like her husband, [Hillary] will govern from the center, and work to get things done, and be capable of garnering support across different groups, including working with Republicans.”2

  How are the bankers so sure? Possibly because they have read the memoirs of Robert Rubin, the former chairman of Citibank, the former secretary of the Treasury, the former co-head of Goldman Sachs. One of the themes in this book is Rubin’s constant war with the populists in the Party and in the Clinton administration—a struggle in which Hillary was an important ally. Rubin tells how Hillary once helped him to get what he calls “class-laden language” deleted from a presidential speech and also how she helped prevent the Democrats from appealing to “class conflict” in a general election—on the grounds that it “is not an effective approach” to the “swing voters in the middle of the electorate.”3

  Trying to figure out exactly where Hillary Clinton actually stands on political issues can be crazy-making. As a presidential candidate, for example, she says she deplores the revolving door between government and Wall Street because it destroys our “trust in government”—a noble sentiment. When she ran the State Department, however, that door spun on a well-lubricated axis. As a presidential candidate, she opposes Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, as do I; as secretary of state, however, she helped negotiate it. As a presidential candidate in 2008, she claimed to oppose NAFTA, the first great triumph of the (Bill) Clinton administration; not only had she supported it earlier, but as a U.S. senator, she had voted for numerous Bush administration free-trade treaties.4

  The same is true nearly wherever you look. The great imprisonment mania of the 1990s, for example: As first lady, Hillary’s appetite to incarcerate was unassuageable. “We need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders,” she said in 1994, kicking off a bloodthirsty call for more three-strikes laws. On another day, seven years later, Senator Hillary Clinton could be found urging law students to “Dare to care about the one and a half million children who have a parent in jail.”5 Even the well-being of poor women and children, Hillary’s great signature issue in her youth, had to hit the bricks when the time arrived in 1996 for welfare reform, a measure she not only supported but for which she says she lobbied.6

  As a presidential candidate in 2008, Hillary liked to identify herself with working-class middle Americans; as a lawyer in Arkansas in the Eighties, however, she was a proud member of the board of directors of Wal-Mart, the retailer that has acted on middle America like a neutron bomb. As a student leader in the Sixties, she opposed the Vietnam War; as a senator in the Bush years, she voted for the Iraq War; as a presidential candidate, she has now returned to her roots and acknowledges that vote was wrong.

  On the increasingly fraught matter of the sharing economy—the battle of Silicon Valley and Uber versus the workers of the world—Hillary actually tried to have it both ways in the same speech in July 2015. She first said she approved of how these new developments were “unleashing innovation,” but also allowed that she worried about the “hard questions” they raised. That was tepid, but it was not tepid enough. Republicans pounced; they harbored no reservations at all about innovation, they said. Hillary’s chief technology officer was forced to double down on her employer’s wishy-wash: “Sharing economy firms are disrupting traditional industries for the better across the globe,” she wrote, but workers still needed to be protected. This dutiful inhabitant of Hillaryland then rushed to remind “the tech community” of the ties that bound them to the Democrats: immigration, environment, and gay marriage. Republicans? Ugh: “very few technologists I know stand with them.”7

  Times change. Politicians compromise. Neither is a sin. The way Hillary herself puts it is that while her principles never waver, “I do absorb new information.”8 Still, her combination is unique. She is politically capricious, and yet (as we shall see) she maintains an image of rock-solid moral commitment. How these two coexist is the mystery of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

  “I’M GOOD, I’M GOOD, I’M GOOD”

  The one thing about Hillary that everyone knows and on which everyone agrees is how smart she is. She is an accomplished professional, a brilliant leader of a brilliant generation, a woman of obvious intelligence.

  Rather than investigate her record, biographies of Hillary Clinton read like high-achieving résumés. They tell us about her accomplishments in high school in the Chicago suburbs, how she was student-body president at Wellesley College, what she said in her bold graduation speech in 1969, and how that speech was covered by Life magazine, which was in turn excited by the “top students” around the country who were rebelling even as they graduated. Then: the fine law schools into which Hillary was accepted, her deeds at the Yale law review, how she made the shortlist of lawyers invited to work on the Nixon impeachment inquiry, and how she could easily have bagged a partnership at a prestigious law firm but—in a risky gambit marveled at by everyone who writes about her—how she chose instead to move to Arkansas and join forces with that other prominent leader of the Sixties generation, Bill Clinton, who had managed to compile an impressive résumé in his own right.

  Her biographers write about Hillary this way because her successes in the upper reaches of the meritocracy are what make her a leader. Indeed, Hillary talks this way herself. In 2001, when she was a U.S. senator from New York, she was still telling the story of how she made the hard choice between Yale and Harvard law schools. The theme of her 2008 presidential campaign was opening the most important job in the world to talent. As secretary of state in the Obama years, she repeated many times her belief that “talent is universal, but opportunity is not.” It is her motto, her credo, her innermost faith: that smart people are born free but everywhere they are in chains, prevented by unfair systems from rising to the top.9 Meritocrac
y is who she is.

  The other persistent refrain in accounts of Hillary Clinton’s life is her dedication to high principle. Again, all her biographers agree on this, everyone knows it is true. The way Hillary negotiates between high-minded principle and the practical demands of the world is a theme that weaves itself into her story just as growth and self-actualization flavor biographies of her husband. It comes naturally to everyone who thinks about her, and it has since the very beginning, since her college commencement speech in 1969 rebuked those who thought of politics as “the art of the possible” rather than “the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.”

  “Hillary always knew what was right,” declares biographer Gail Sheehy. “Over the long haul,” observes biographer David Brock, “she had no intention of conceding the substantive issues or bedrock principles to the other side.” Her 2008 campaign adviser Ann Lewis once described Hillary’s political philosophy with this inspirational-poster favorite: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”10

  “Hillary’s ambition was always to do good on a huge scale,” writes biographer Carl Bernstein of her college years, “and her nascent instinct, so visible at Wellesley, to mediate principle with pragmatism—without abandoning basic beliefs—seemed a powerful and plausible way of achieving it.”11

  That’s some slippery stuff right there, but you get the feeling that Bernstein is doing his best. After all, describing someone’s “ambition to do good on a huge scale” is like analyzing the harmonies of the spheres: it’s not easy. And it gets even less easy when Bernstein’s heroine goes to Yale Law School. There, the journalist writes, “she was a recognizable star on campus, much discussed among the law school’s students, known as politically ambitious, practical, and highly principled.”12